


Erik Lehnsherr's Seven Heavenly Sins

by tzzzz



Series: Seven Virtues, Seven Sins [1]
Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-03-05
Updated: 2012-04-15
Packaged: 2017-11-01 12:57:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,668
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/357052
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tzzzz/pseuds/tzzzz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Erik's not a saint, but he makes things work anyway.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Greed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Erik bites off more than he can chew and must be rescued by the Xmen.

Erik wakes with a moan. He tries to open his eyes, but the light is too bright and he feels nauseous. He’s not even sure he’s properly awake at all. His body feels distant. All he hears is a dull murmur of voices, smells a clean, pure smell that reminds him of a hospital. It reminds him of Shaw. His eyes flash open, but all he sees is blue. It’s then that he realizes that he can’t feel any metal. 

His head is lying on something soft. A warmth soothes the ache as he tries to push himself up, only to collapse back down onto the soft surface when he feels something in his chest pull how it shouldn’t. 

The voices stop. Then a hand brushes through his hair, soft and gentle. “Shh . . .” a voice says.

“Charles?” he asks, before memory snaps back into place. Charles isn’t here. Charles doesn’t want Erik any more. He claims that he forgives Erik for paralyzing him, but he’s giving Erik exactly what he deserves - taking away the best relationship Erik could ever hope to have. 

Erik can’t move his torso, with strong hands holding him in place, but he can tilt his head up to see Mystique’s relieved smile. “Finally,” she says, ignoring his plea for Charles in the way she’s been ignoring his brooding these past five months.

“How long?” he coughs out, grabbing his ribs against the fire that action sets in his chest.

“Four hours,” another female voice answers from behind him, muffled somehow. He can tell by the agitated flutter of wings that it’s Angel. 

“What happened?” Erik ignores Mystique’s protests until she helps him to sit up, propped up between her legs as she leans against the wall. He hates to admit it, but he needs the support. The last time he’d felt this way had been in the camps with Schmidt, after a rough beating from the guards. He hadn’t even been able to move himself off the damp floor. He would have died if Schmidt hadn’t brought him back to his own bedroom to suffer the indignity of his torturer taking tender care of him, among other, worse indignities. 

“Do you know where we are?”

Erik squints. His mind is jumbled. He must have a concussion as well. “China?” he guesses. He doesn’t know exactly when, but he remembers standing in the war room, tired after five months of barely sleeping in his empty bed, telling his people that unlike the Russian and American mutant programs, which they had succeeded in taking down from the inside out, what the Chinese were doing couldn’t be modified for their own purposes - it had to be razed to the ground. Erik felt vindicated when Frost had agreed with him. He’d been so angry lately that he was beginning to doubt his own objectivity. 

It is only him, Mystique and Angel in the cell - actually it resembles a log cabin more than a cell. Erik can even hear birds chirping outside. Angel is separated from them by two rows of thick wooden poles and she as some kind of mask on her face. Erik is being generous, thinking of it as mask, when it more resembles a muzzle. 

“Typical Chinese, low tech, but highly effective solution,” Erik remarks. If he focuses his power, he can feel the faint traces of metal in the soil that are present everywhere, but less than he is accustomed to in the harsh granite soils of the United States or Europe. Erik wishes he had devoted more time to working with these trace elements - there just aren’t enough.

“Emma did say that she had suspicions that the Chinese had information on us,” Mystique remarks. “This confirms it.”

Erik had been greedy. He fully admits it. They could have taken their time - let Emma find out the Chinese information source and stamp it out before attacking, but after finding out what was being done to these children, Erik hadn’t wanted to wait. He knew that the repressive communist government wouldn’t be the first to leak news of mutants to society at large, even under a full-frontal assault, and he’d wanted to act. He admits, he’d been bored with Charles’s stupid compromise - one that he’d made under the assumption that they’d actually be executing it together. He had wanted to attack the humans and China had provided him with the chance. 

“We couldn’t let them go on this way,” Erik snaps.

The flutter of Angel’s wings increases in speed, becoming erratic. “At least I’m glad we hadn’t waited until those children had been fully grown.”

“Huh?” Erik asks. He remembers a building, rows and rows of rooms like cells, most of them empty. The others, bunk beds filled with children with their hollow, determined eyes. It’s a flash and then it’s gone.

“You don’t remember it?” Mystique asks. “That little girl. You tried to help her and she created an explosion from nothing? It brought the whole building down?”

“That’s why I feel like a building just fell down on top of my head.”

“You shielded yourself and the girl using what metal you could find, but something got through.”

Erik struggles, agitated. He remembers the girl now, the sparkly lights she created. She couldn’t have been more than six years old - an innocent, for all the hurt she’d obviously caused him. Erik thinks about Will and Simon and the kind of monsters they might have become if raised by their monster of a father. He remembers one of the few times he’d returned to the mansion after deciding to move out. He’d needed to ask Charles about the D.C. work and had ended up walking in on Charles with his wheelchair pushed right up to Will’s bed, holding what must be a first English edition of the Little Prince in one hand and cradling Simon in the other as he read out loud. He’d looked up at Erik when he reached the part about the fox being tamed, a kind, ironic smile on his face. 

“What happened to her?” Erik asks.

Mystique smiles sardonically, running her fingers lightly over the sticky patch of Erik’s hair where something must have hit him. “You’re turning into a bleeding heart, just like my brother.”

Erik grits his teeth. “If you only knew the things I did when Schmidt had me and I was just a child.”

That wipes the smile off Mystique’s face and she flushes a deeper blue in embarrassment. Sometimes Erik forgets that, despite how much she’s grown since he’s known her, Mystique is still so young. “She . . . um . . . they came and took her away.”

“And where were the two of you when all this was happening?” Erik accuses. Mystique doesn’t appear to have a scratch on her and Angel is uninjured. 

Mystique flinches. He knows he’s being too hard on them. That was why he and Charles worked so well together - good cop, bad cop. Of course, there’s a part of him that always thought of their roles as more like mother and father.

“I was keeping watch from the roof, like you told me,” Angel says, looking defiant. “They had another mutant. At least, I think it was a mutant. It was like a cloud of white smoke. I thought maybe there was a fire and I went to check it out. Then it made itself solid somehow. It grabbed me and it was like I was freezing. I tried to fly away, but it held me down. It could float in the air, but it was solid.” She shivers. “When it had me on the ground, it held me until the guards could put this stupid thing on me,” she spits. “It’s plastic, so my acid can’t erode it. The building exploded as they were dragging me away.”

“So you saw where we are.”

“We’re on an island in the middle of a rice paddy. Which is in the middle of nowhere. The guards all have Chinese characters painted on their chests and every five minutes they sing a different damn commie song, with each guard singing a line in order. They haven’t repeated the same song since we’ve been here, so even if she could somehow get out of here, there’s no way Mystique could impersonate one of them for long.”

“Is that how they got to you?” Erik asks Mystique. 

Her hands clench in Erik’s hair in rage, but stop when she catches his wince. 

“After you opened all the doors to let the children out, a lot of them wouldn’t come. You left me and Emma to try to convince them to leave while you and Azazel went to look for documents and, I assume, more people to kill.” Mystique’s tone leaves no room for doubt - the initial attack on the building had been bloody. Erik wishes he could remember it. These past months he’s felt his anger festering like a wound, suffering under the torture of being Charles’s better man, without a single reward for his efforts. “That’s when the next wave came. Emma’s not like Charles - she can’t freeze that many people at once. Even in her diamond form, she couldn’t stop that many people from putting one of those stupid helmets on her.” Erik reaches for his own helmet, but of course it’s long gone. Emma had mentioned that the helmet was made for Schmidt by the Russians. It stands to reason that they might have given one to their Chinese allies as well. “I blended into the crowd of guards until they sung their dumb song,” Raven pouts.

Erik groans, his head falling back against Raven’s lap. His ribs are throbbing, he can barely keep his thoughts straight, and like every waking moment for the past months, he misses Charles deeper than a physical pain. “The god damned Chinese. So they have Emma too. They must be keeping her somewhere else, presumably so I won’t be able to remove the helmet for her. What about Azazel?”

Raven bites her lip. “I don’t know. He was with you. The guards had me, Angel, and all the kids outside when the building blew. Azazel wasn’t in the wreckage. But if he’d gotten away clean, he would have come back for us already.”

Erik wracks his brain trying to remember, but there’s nothing but a blank fuzziness there when he reaches for the memories. “Damnit!” he slams his bruised, bloody hands down into the dirt. “We should have just grabbed the information and gotten out. They were prepared for all of us.”

Mystique pets him again, as though he’s a child in need of soothing. Soothing is the last thing Erik needs, however. What he needs is to get the hell out of here. And after that he needs to come back for all these kids before Mao breaks them, the way Schmidt broke Erik. They deserve the chance to be more than just soldiers or tired, empty men who let vengeance consume even the best things in their lives.

It’s Angel who snaps, “Fine, we should have been more cautious. But what were we supposed to do? You were right about what this facility is. They were grabbing any kids that showed any promise of special physical or mental abilities, or kids of parents with unusual abilities and started brainwashing them on the off-chance that they might be mutants. They live in basically cells with six beds each, eat in a cafeteria, do nothing but train and be ‘reeducated’ out in the countryside. They don’t get to see their parents and the only love they ever receive is as a reward for their mutant talents. They even had a nursery! You were right, Magneto.”

The light in Angel’s eyes reminds Erik that finally, after she’d allied with Charles and then with Schmidt and now with Erik, Erik is the only one who had finally managed to make Angel a true believer. He’s not sure how he feels about having that power. It somehow seems more dangerous than the power to bend metal to his will.

Mystique nods at Angel’s words. “Great. Now that we know we’re right, how are we going to get out of here?”

Both of them are looking at Erik with such anticipation that it’s almost painful. They look up to him and he’s about to let them down. He’s injured and there’s not a drop of metal anywhere near them. He can’t get them out of here. 

“We wait,” he sighs.

Angel and Mystique deflate. In the background, their guards are singing.

***

They wait a long time. Erik glances at the muddy marks left against the wall of their wooden prison. It’s been nearly a week of sleeping in the mud, staring at each other’s blank features. The Chinese haven’t bothered to do anything with them yet. 

“They’re not trying to break us,” Erik remarks. He’s recovered from his concussion, but in the cold damp of their little hut he has begun to develop a terrible cough. Mystique suspects pneumonia, from being unable, due to his broken ribs, to cough and expel the phlegm that is building in his lungs. “It would be wiser to kill us. No, what they want to do is study us, but they haven’t developed a way to control us yet.”

They aren’t children just getting used to their powers. And obviously there are no Chinese mutants like Schmidt who are at least impervious to attack from Erik. “I bet they’re trying to break Frost,” Erik muses. “If they had their own telepath, they would have us under the microscope already.”

“Or maybe they’ll breed us,” Angel whispers. The guards have been shoving wooden bowls of rice into the cell for Erik and Mystique, but they don’t want to risk taking the muzzle off to feed Angel. She has been getting weaker by the day. 

“C’mon, Angel, that’s gross,” Mystique complains.

“I makes sense,” Angel protests. “Why else would they keep us all together? They must know that isolation is better to break a person. And they haven’t bothered to do anything else with us. They must know that we’ll never fight for them, but if they get their hands on a child, they can brainwash it just like all the rest!”

Erik just grunts in acknowledgement, shivering. Mystique wraps her arms tighter around him, though he can tell she’s more uncomfortable doing it after Angel’s statement. “Don’t worry,” Mystique whispers. “I learned a long time ago not to play with Charles’s toys.”

Erik grimaces. He’d suspected that Mystique had been aware of their relationship, but it had never been confirmed. 

“I’m not Charles’s toy,” he sighs.

“Fine, his boyfriend, partner, one true love. Whatever. I know not to mess with it.”

“I’m not his anything anymore,” he growls.

Angel looks speculative, but Mystique just looks sad. “Oh, Erik.” He politely ignores her use of his first name. Any other time he would argue with her, but right now he’s more interested in her as Raven, sister-to-Charles, than as Mystique. “You will _never_ be nothing to Charles. He doesn’t love easily, but once he loves you, he’ll never give up on you.”

Erik has to raise his eyebrows at that. Charles is the poster boy for the whole touchy-feely, lovey-dovey, there’s good in everyone movement.

Rave swats at him gently, careful not to jar his ribs. “He doesn’t! Look, Charles wants to be _kind_ to everybody. He loves people, generally, much more than you do.”

“Obviously,” Angel interjects.

“But before you came along, I was his only friend. Charles never lacked for bar buddies or random floozies to warm his bed, but the same telepathy that makes it so easy for Charles to love people generally makes it hard for him to love people specifically. In minutes he can know everything about a person - so much that he probably knows thousands of people better than most people know their own spouse. He seen so much that he’s jaded. Don’t you see, Erik? You’re special enough that even after he saw everything about you, he still fell in love with you.”

Those words hurt more than the broken feeling in Erik’s chest. They hurt more than anything Schmidt ever did to him. If Charles truly is in love with him, then why did he push Erik away? If what Raven says is true, then Erik managed what he never thought possible - the love of a truly good person. Erik thinks it’s crueler to have that love and then lose it than to never have had it at all. 

“He doesn’t love me anymore.”

“C’mon,” Raven rolls her eyes. “It’s obvious he’s moping over you. Charles just loves playing the martyr. He thinks he’s being noble and setting you free. If you don’t want to be with a cripple, fine. Or if you’d rather concentrate on the mission, that’s okay too. But if you truly want Charles, you can’t _let_ him push you away. You have to fight for him. You’ll fight to the death for everything else that means something to you. Why not fight for Charles?”

“Because I have to respect what he wants!” Erik isn’t about to tell Raven that her brother’s paralysis has left him uninterested in sex. 

“Charles doesn’t know what he wants!”

Erik gulps. Raven has known Charles practically her whole life, even if their relationship has been strained at times. Maybe she’s right. “I’ll take it under advisement.”

***

Just when Erik thinks he’s going to break under Raven’s probing stare, Erik hear a familiar high-pitched shriek. 

“Sean,” Raven breathes.

Erik struggles to push himself up, readying for battle. They don’t have to wait for long before two inhumanly strong figures are lifting one of the huge wooden tree trunks away from the wall. Erik isn’t surprised to see Piotr, but the other guy . . . .

“Take a picture, bub; it’ll last you longer.”

“Last time I saw you, you were telling me to go fuck myself.” Erik winces as Raven wraps one of his arms around her to support him out of their cell and into the daylight. Piotr tears the muzzle off and scoops Angel up into his arms easily. 

The guy, James, if Erik remembers correctly, just shrugs. Charles said that the man’s mind was incredibly difficult to read, so he’s not sure what his power is. Whatever it is, Erik is grateful that James doesn’t bother to try to carry Erik, despite how much he stumbles. 

It’s not long before Sean drops out of the sky, with barely a stumble on the landing. “Come _on_ , Wolverine. We need to go. There’s some kind of commotion at the facility. The Professor has the humans locked down, but he can’t control some of the mutants. Piotr can drop these guys off at the jet.”

“Charles is here?” Erik growls. In a wheelchair, Charles is a sitting duck for anyone he can’t control with his telepathy.

“Erik, you’re obviously injured, man. We’ve got this under control.”

“Like hell you do.” There is no way Erik is going to leave Charles’s safety in the hands of these _children_. Children and what appears to be a logger with an attitude. He glares at this Wolverine guy.

“Don’t look at me, bub. Do I look like I care if you want to kill yourself by fighting injured?” 

“ _Wolverine_ ,” Sean complains, but the guy just starts off towards what must be the facility at a jog, but not before dropping an iron diver’s weight at Erik’s feet. There’s no way Erik can run in his condition, but it’s easy enough to shape the weight into a disc and ride. 

“I’m going to fly,” Sean remarks, already halfway up a tree in order to take off. “The Professor sounded like he was in trouble.”

“Take Angel back to the jet,” Erik orders Piotr. He doesn’t bother to ask Mystique whether she will be following.

***

The facility where they’re holding Frost is different than the training dormitory that Erik’s team assaulted a week ago. Though obviously not the best environment to raise a child, at least the training facility had high ceilings (keeping the ample windows well out of reach) and even some wooden floors in parts of it. Brick walls meant that there was a lot less for Erik to work with when it was falling down around him. Frost, on the other hand, is being kept in a bunker. Concrete means steel rebar, not to mention the heavy metal doors and the bars guarding cell after dank, dark cell. 

The doors are already open when they walk in. The human guards are slumped against walls or curled up in the corridors - obvious evidence that Charles has been here. What scares Erik are the familiar scorch marks on the walls: despite his newfound control, the fact that Havoc had to use his mutation at all is evidence that Charles could not subdue everyone.

 _Erik, quickly,_ a familiar mental voice invades Erik’s brain. In retrospect, he should have expected it, but the presence makes Erik stumble. He brushes off Mystique’s attempts to help him regain his balance. Erik has forgotten how much he’d missed that voice in his head.

Charles sends his location with a flash of knowledge. Fuck his injured ribs, Erik takes off at a run down a long corridor. According to the images that Charles is sending, Charles and Alex barricaded in a side room. Charles is keeping all of the humans and most of the mutant children asleep while Alex battles something that looks like the white mist creature that Angel described. Alex’s skin is glowing red, his whole body alight with his mutation to prevent the freezing cold coming of the creature from melting into his bones. 

But that’s not a problem that Erik can deal with. Even more critical is the battle going in the corridor. Erik hears it before he dares approach. Sean is screaming: not the scream that has people bending and covering their ears, but the one that actually killed quite a few poor lab animals when he was testing it out. It’s not fatal from a distance, but Erik stops, pulling everyone into another side room when he gets close enough for his nose to bleed.

“Whoever Sean is screaming at is being incapacitated by something that should be fatal,” Erik explains. “And I can sense some strange metal.” Erik had only tasted this metal once. He’d been trying to cross the border into Russia in order to track Schmidt and there it was - a metal that seemed to sing with perfection, calling out to him like a siren’s song even when it was too far away for him to manipulate. It’d been buried deep withing Elmendorf Air Force Base, so Erik had forced himself to forget about tracking it down - the last thing he needed was to attract the attention of the US Government.

That perfect metal is in motion, but Erik still can’t figure out its purpose. He needs more information.

 _Charles?_ he tries to project, the way Charles taught him. But before he can get an answer, Wolverine rumbles, “that scream’s not fatal to me.” Before Erik can stop him, he’s yanking the door open and running.

“I’m starting to hate that guy,” Erik tells Mystique. 

Mystique rolls her eyes. “Yeah, he’s the only one here who would ever go running into a dangerous situation half-cocked.”

“I don’t know what you think you’re implying, but . . .”

“Moira told me all about Russia,” Mystique says simply.

Erik doesn’t hate the Wolverine quite so much when Sean’s scream stops and is instead replaced with a shout. “Magneto, get down here!” When Erik left, Sean had just been starting to work on using his vocal muscles to shout words rather than scream. Erik can’t help but be impressed by how much progress Charles had managed to make with him. 

Erik and Mystique arrive to a scene that would be funny if it wasn’t so utterly terrifying. Wolverine is battling what appears to be a twelve-year-old girl and he’s not exactly winning. She is wearing a bright red full body leotard and she is dancing around a guy that looks like a cage wrestle willing to rip his opponent to shreds. Wolverine hits her hard enough for her to go flying across the room, but she gets up without a scratch, leaping back towards him. It isn’t until she’s climbed up onto Wolverine’s chest to punch him in the face that Erik realizes that the strange metal is inside of her, just in time to see what appears to be knives slide out of the tips of her fingers. Erik doesn’t have time to act before she jabs them down into Wolverine’s chest. Erik feels that same moment of horror, the bottom dropping out of the world, that he felt when he failed to deflect the bullets in a way that would keep Charles safe. He’s already halfway to blaming himself for Wolverine’s death when the man grunts, grabs the girl’s wrists and yanks them free, snarling. The wound appears to heal within seconds. Erik must admit that its and intriguing mutation.

“Magneto!” Sean shouts, shaking Erik out of his fascinated reverie. 

That’s right, the girl has metal inside her body and Erik can manipulate metal. Now it’s his turn for a feral grin.

“Tsk, tsk,” he shakes his finger at the girl, pinning her to the wall with her own metal claws.

When he turns back to Wolverine, he’s surprised to see that he too has claws, but these are rough and made of bone. The slide out of the skin of his knuckles, to point at the girl’s throat.

“I have her,” Erik commands. “Take Mystique and find Frost.”

Erik rips the metal door off the sideroom easily, finding the exact scene that Charles sent him. 

The room is scorching now. Charles’s fair skin is already tinged red where he sits, perfectly still, in his chair with his fingers pressed to his temple. Erik yanks the metal of the chair towards him, knowing that without Charles in the room, Alex can burn brighter and maybe even kill the white apparition that’s engulfing him.

“You shouldn’t have come here,” Erik murmurs, knowing full well that Charles is too deep in a telepathic trance to hear him.

The metal door of the room they were just in is starting to melt. Erik uses his power to keep it in place, but the exhaustion of his injury and subsequent illness are taking their toll. He really hopes that the damn Wolverine won’t have to carry him out of here.

The door is glowing molten hot, now. Erik is getting ready to just grab Charles and make a run for it before Alex goes nuclear when a sudden grin appears on Charles’s face. The heat stops and Charles is in Erik’s mind again, enfolding him in comfort and complexity, and yes, love. Raven was right.

“Erik,” Charles whispers, leaning forward in his chair to wrap his arms around Erik’s waist, gentle in deference to his ribs. “I was so worried.”

“It’s okay. I’m fine,” Erik pats Charles’s hair awkwardly. Maybe if they were still together, or maybe if Charles could still stand and they were eye to eye, they would kiss. But that isn’t Erik’s life. Instead he contents himself with resting his palm on Charles’s sunburnt skin, feeling the soft strands of his hair brush against his fingertips. Charles’s mind embraces Erik much tighter than Erik’s body could stand from a physical hug. Charle’s relief is overwhelming, as is his unbridled joy at finding Erik relatively intact. But something else stirs in the depths - maybe regret, or perhaps even saddness.

“Charles,” Erik begins. He’s not sure if he wants to berate Charles for taking on such a dangerous mission or tell him he still loves him or beg him to let Erik come home, but before he can finish, his concentration slips and the door he’d been keeping from liquefying splashes to the floor with a his.

“I take it they found Emma,” Alex says, still glowing a bit as he steps over the remains of the metal door. 

Erik lets out a small whimper when Charles’s mind pulls back, leaving Erik feeling bereft. But then those bright blue eyes are fixed on him, even though Charles is answering Alex’s question. “They did. Together we were able to restrain the mutant you were fighting. The apparition is a kind of projection, rooted deep in the mutant’s psyche, but capable of physical manifestation. What you witnessed was most likely just the tip of the iceberg of what this child will be capable of as an adult. It took both myself and Emma to subdue him.” Erik files that information away. Even though Erik is willing to fight to the death for the survival of their kind, he is aware that some mutations can be exceedingly dangerous. If they manage to convince these mutants to come with them, he’ll have to watch this one.

“Did they find Azazel too?” Erik asks, still transfixed by the look Charles is giving him - like he’s the most amazing thing Charles has ever seen.

“Azazel transported himself to the mansion yesterday. He was incoherent, badly injured. Apparently he’d transported himself away from the scene, but hadn’t been strong enough to get back to Westchester right away. It took us a day to find this place without him. We need a new policy. Next time you do something like this, you have to leave at least one person behind, whether myself of a member of your team, who knows exactly what you’re doing in case you need rescue.”

Erik nods, feeling like child being scolded. He finds, however, that he doesn’t really care, still riding high on the knowledge that Charles still loves him.

Raven is right. He’s going to be greedy and selfish and all the things Charles is not. He’s going to win Charles back.


	2. Envy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Erik is jealous of Wolverine.

ENVY

Surprisingly, it was Alex that had put up a fight about taking the young mutants back with them from China. He’d been concerned about the safety of his brother and the other students, but Charles was wary of making them feel like prisoners. 

Erik had only been half conscious at the time, slumped against Mystique in the jet while Charles did his best to examine his injuries.

Now Erik finds himself exhausted, more from the illness than injury. Still, Beast insists on bed rest and there’s not much Erik can do with the majority of his team out of commission. Angel is weak from starvation, but regaining her lost weight quickly. Emma was not physically harmed, thanks to her diamond form, but being cut off from her telepathy did something to her. She’s no longer the tough, irreverent woman that Erik is used to, more like a white ghost floating from room to room, staring out the window. Erik doesn’t even have the heart to wear the helmet around her. She spends a lot of time with Charles, probably because he is the only one who can understand. 

Azazel is the worst off. He’d teleported away, but with a large spike of wood piercing his side. He’s been feverish and barely conscious for days, but he’s improving steadily. Mystique, the only one to escape unscathed, spends much of her spare time reading to him in the rudimentary Russian she has been learning.

Erik submits, half heartedly, to taking his old room at the mansion. Charles looks ridiculous, red as a lobster and peeling from exposure to Alex’s mutation, but he takes it with aplomb, other than allowing the stupid Wolverine to push and carry him, to keep from stretching his healing burns too much. 

It’s Wolverine that stands in front of Erik now, looking speculative.

“Is there something I can do for you?” Erik asks, forcing himself to sit up taller even though it hurts his healing ribs.

“Yes, there is.” Wolverine heads over to the french doors leading out to Erik’s balcony. Even though Erik knows that forcing Erik to follow his lead is a power play, he follows anyway. He finds that he pretty much hates the guy, but he’s intrigued by where Wolverine is going with this. Wolverine pulls out two cigars and hands one to Erik. Erik doubts smoking is good for his still-healing lungs, but not to be outdone, he uses his power to lift the Zippo lighter out of Wolverine’s leather jacket and light the cigar. 

After choking back a cough, Erik demands, “What do you want?”

“That girl, the one with the claws.”

Erik nods. He remembers. He also remembers stripping the metal from those bone-claws, so much like the Wolverine’s.

“She and I have the same mutation. We’re strong and we heal. Good enough that they put that metal in her body. Beast says that when her bones stopped growing, they were going to do it to her entire skeleton.”

Erik can’t help but shiver at that, remembering all the things Shaw tried to enhance Erik’s mutation. He’d even tried to implant metal beneath Erik’s skin, but it had ended in infection and near death. 

“I’m full grown,” Wolverine states, emphatically. 

“Are you saying that you _want_ that done to you?”

Woverine shrugs. “It’ll make me a better fighter. Near invincible, if I heal and my bones are made of the strongest stuff on the planet.”

And it means that Erik will be able to literally control every bone in his body.

“I can understand the temptation,” Erik agrees.

“So you’ll help me?” Wolverine asks.

“Excuse me?”

“Well it’s not like we just have a pile of adamantium lying around. And even if we did, who better to graft the stuff onto my skeleton than a guy who can manipulate metal? The Beast agrees, the Chinese plan was crazy.”

Erik can see that. Adamantium is so strong that it can only be liquefied at near impossible temperatures and only stays liquid for a short period of time. Not to mention the complication of getting it to coat the bones rather than solidify into globules in the flesh. Still, the process would be horrifically painful and would test Wolverine’s healing factor to its limit. Erik could easily end up with a death on his hands. 

“Charles agreed to this?”

Wolverine rolls his eyes. “Chuck doesn’t need to know. This is my personal business and I shoot first and ask questions later. Besides, the guy likes me.”

Erik finds that hard to believe. Not that Charles likes the Wolverine, because Charles likes everyone, but that Charles especially likes him. Erik can appreciate that the guy is good looking, with incredible musculature, but other than that, he’s a cigar smoking, bar fighting, generally horibbly behaved boor. Charles likes chess and long philosophical discussions and he _reads_. There’s nothing he could possibly see in Wolverine other than a very interesting mutation.

But then again, Charles really likes mutations. And Wolverine is attractive. 

Erik grits his teeth. “We’ll need to ask Charles. He can knock you unconscious without the use of drugs, which I take it don’t work on you.”

“I don’t need drugs. I can handle it.”

“It’ll be easier if you’re completely immobilized. I’m afraid I have to insist.”

Wolverine grunts, but nods in acknowledgement.

“And we’ll have to find some more Adamantium. Is that what you called it?”

“That’s what Beast says was written in the reports.”

Erik sighs. “I’ve felt it before. The US military has a supply. Mystique will most likely be able to track it down using her Stryker alias.” Luckily, Mystique-as-Stryker had been able to set up an operation so secret that she was able to operate with little oversight, allowing her to maintain the alias without killing Stryker off. And Charles sometimes used his telepathy to act as Stryker as well. “But it may take time.”

Wolverine shrugs. “I got time, bub. Plenty of time.”

“What do you mean?”

Wolverine chuckles. “How old do you think I am?”

It’s Erik’s turn to shrug. “I don’t know. Thirty?”

“Try 129.”

Okay, maybe that might be something of interest to Charles. Wolverine must have lived through a lot of history. The changes he’d seen in his time on Earth, in terms of technology, culture, the basic conditions of human life. And unlike Azazel, who fascinates Erik for the same reasons, Wolverine could actually blend into society and live all those periods of history. The question was, how had Wolverine lived that long without ever learning any manners?

“So you have time,” Erik agrees, “but you don’t have the resources to do it on your own. You’ll need us, and in exchange for making you almost indestructible, I’ll ask you to use those skills to fight with us.”

“Fighting’s easy,” Wolverine replies. “I fought in a lot of wars. Some were righteous and others not so much.”

“We’re fighting for the protection of our people.”

“Who said you are all my people?”

“Mutants. We’re all mutants.”

“We can all do special things. So what? Just in this house we’ve got Americans, Russians, Chinese. We were raised in different parts of the world with different values. Hell, I’m from another time. I agree with Chuck, that we shouldn’t be condemned for what we are, but we ain’t a people, bub. We ain’t a family.”

Charles could probably find some hidden psychological meaning in that, but Erik is at a loss. “If you don’t believe in the mutant cause, then why are you here?”

Wolverine takes a long drag from his cigar, contemplating it before responding. “Chuck was at the right place at the right time. I was getting too much attention so I planned to retire my current army alias and pick up something different when Chuck showed up pretending to be that Stryker character, recruiting for some CIA controlled mission. His telepathy doesn’t work so good on me, so I saw right through it. He said I could still fight working for him at the CIA, but it’d be more meaningful than fighting communism. I agreed.”

“What happened to ‘fuck off?’” Erik asks.

“I dunno. I guess he found a way to persuade me.” Wolverine winks. Erik narrows his eyes in suspicion. That wink isn’t good. It isn’t good at all.

***  
Erik finds Charles in the rose garden, holding Simon on his lap and pointing to various rose bushes and explaining how they were crossbred to produce particular phenotypes. His wheelchair is nowhere to be seen, which means that Wolverine must have carried them out here. 

“Erik!” Charles smiles, giving Erik’s mind a warm mental nudge along with it. “I hope you’re feeling better.”

Erik gives him a curt nod. The pneumonia has passed, but his ribs themselves are still tender. According to Beast it will be another week before Erik can lift anything, even little Simon, and another two before he’ll be cleared to train again. 

“Come, sit with us.”

Simon smiles up at Erik, the roses forgotten. He claps his hands and reaches for Erik the second Erik sits down. 

“He is quite a remarkable child.” Charles is grinning like a loon, clearly proud of his adopted son. “You were right, Erik. I find myself rather attached.”

If they were still together, Erik would have leaned over and transformed Charles’s smile into a kiss. Instead he pats Charles’s knee, realizing too late that Charles won’t be able to feel it. Erik tries to be inconspicuous in removing it and placing a hand on Charles’s shoulder instead.

Simon grabs for the hand and Erik relents, even letting him put two of Erik’s fingers in his mouth.

“What about Will?” Erik asks. “How’s he settling in?”

Charles sighs. “We broke the news to him about his father’s death two weeks ago. He cried, but to be honest, it wasn’t as bad a reaction as I was expecting. He and Scott get along quite well. After I scolded Will for picking on Scott’s blindness, they have formed a friendship. I’ve been reading some of King Arthur’s tales to them at night and it is now their favorite game.”

“I can talk to him, if you’d like,” Erik offers, tentatively. He stands by what he said to Charles earlier about not wanting the kids to get too attached to him, because he knows that he’ll eventually have to leave them. But on the other hand, Will lost his father, just like Erik lost his mother. Erik knows in the depth of his heart that killing William Stryker Sr. was critical to the safety of both mutants and humans, but Will is in the age where a kid idolizes his parents, whether they are good like Erik’s mother or evil bastards like Will’s father.

“You do realize that if he follows in your footsteps, it’s you that he’ll be seeking revenge against when he grows up,” Charles remarks, a little bitterly. It reminds Erik all over again how he’ll never be good enough for Charles. For all he’s trying, he already commited a crime in Charles’s book when he chose revenge over forgiveness, irregardless of the fact that they both know there was no way they could have let Schmidt live.

“If that’s the path he chooses, I won’t fault him for it,” Erik acknowledges. He’s not a hypocrite, after all. “But I won’t roll over and let him kill me either.”

Charles looks taken aback. Erik must once again remind himself that despite all his many talents, Charles is _normal_ , and normal people don’t talk about 4 year olds one day trying to kill them with any seriousness.

Simon begins to fuss and Charles bounces him up and down soothingly. Erik aches, wanting to hold him, but he knows that it’s not only his ribs that make that a bad idea. It won’t help anybody to get attached.

“I do realize that we have put ourselves in a delicate moral situation by taking in the children of a man we, for all intents and purposes, murdered,” Charles muses, stroking Simon’s hair absently. “But I think that Will can understand one day.”

“ _We_ didn’t murder anyone, Charles. _I_ did. You are doing your best to make it right. But I’m the guilty party here. That’s why our work must remain separated.”

“You _are_ a good man, Erik. I’ve felt it.”

Erik chuckles a little, putting an arm around Charles’s shoulder and kissing him on the temple. “We’ve already had this conversation, liebling.”

“I suppose we have,” Charles acknowledges. “I just . . . it’s good to have you around again, Erik. Just for a little while.”

Erik doesn’t bother telling Charles how good it is to be back, just to see Charles again on a regular basis. He’s sure that Charles must know how much it hurts not to see him every day. But, then again, it was Charles that pushed Erik away, so maybe Charles doesn’t actually care. Instead of telling Charles how much Erik misses him, he says, “I think we should take advantage of our time together while we have it.”

Charles pulls away a little. “Erik, I told you, I’m not looking for a physical relationship.”

Erik wasn’t looking to reopen that particular wound, but it is a perfect opening for the jealousy that’s been festering the past couple of days. “Not even with the Wolverine?”

Charles stares, looking stupid and gape-mouthed, for nearly half a minute before saying, “Logan? You think I want to have sex with _Logan?_ ” Charles laughs, a deep hearty chuckle that Erik has genuinely missed, “Oh, my friend, even if everything still worked down there, I guarantee that Logan would absolutely not be the one to work it. The very idea is ludicrous. What, pray tell, do you think we would talk about?”

Erik figured that with a man like the Wolverine, Charles would just forgo the talking.

Charles laughs again, obviously reading Erik’s thoughts. “Oh dear. I don’t believe that I’ve ever been capable of forgoing talking. And even if I could have managed it once, without the ability to get it up, Logan’s rather blunt charms are even more useless.”

“But, he carries you around!”

“His mutation is super strength and invincibility and you are not fit to be lifting even Simon, so, yes, it’s logical for him to carry me around.”

“You mean you’d want me to?”

“Oh, Erik, I let you carry me in and out of bed even when I had use of my legs. If I remember correctly, it was a very pleasant experience.”

“He says you did something especially persuasive to recruit him,” Erik points out.

Charles rolls his eyes. “Wolverine isn’t a joiner, but he is a soldier and one who picks his sides based on an ingrained sense of justice. When I showed him what happened in Cuba, Logan realized that if this does come to war between mutants and humans, he’d be fighting on the wrong side of it.”

“But he implied . . .” Erik protests.

“Logan is old, my friend, and rather than spending those years learning how to grease the social wheels, he has been learning to clog them.”

“Is that your very uptight British way of saying that Logan was fucking with me?”

“Yes, it is.” After they’ve shared a laugh, Charles pauses, leaning in to press a chaste kiss to Erik’s lips. “You do know that if I did want a sexual relationship, it wouldn’t be anyone else but you.”

Erik is still struggling to come to terms with the fact that Charles doesn’t want it, let alone trying to understand hypotheticals, but he gets the point: his jealousy isn’t warranted. Or welcome.

“Okay. In that case, I’ll need Raven to go in as Stryker tomorrow. We need to find ourselves some adamantium.”

“Adamantium? The metal you stripped from little Yuriko? Whatever would you need more of that for?”

Erik grins. “I’m going to make myself a Wolverine-shaped marionette.”


End file.
